Talking Horse

A few years ago, while attending a homeschooling conference, my husband and I met a man named Andrew Paduwa. He was an incredible speaker and very fun to listen to. He had much to say about the world in which we are living and how important it is for parents to take seriously their duty to bring up their children with strong virtues, strong character, and strong faith. One of his best suggestions for how to do this was deceivingly simple: read good books to your children.

It sounded so simple that at first we didn't think it would do very much--and we soon found that simple and easy are not synonyms!! After several starts and stops we have finally instituted an earlier bedtime and 30-45 minutes of reading time each night. Supposedly, one of us can read to the children while the other does something "productive," but the books that we have chosen, The Chronicles of Narnia, are so engaging that both parents are usually on the floor while the kids are leaning over their beds to listen.

As much as this is sweet family time (hard won, let me say!), it is also a very important time for developing and nurturing the correct understanding of virtue, goodness, character, and the danger of sin. We are just finishing The Horse and His Boy, and I have been struck countless times by the depth of insight that Mr. Lewis had into the human spirit, and into the dangerous and tricky vice of pride.

When the Talking Horse, Bree, realizes that he is not the Great Horse he had always fancied himself to be and begins to be dejected, we are taught a very important lesson about comparing our virtue with those around us, for good or ill. A wise old hermit reminds him, "My good Horse, you've lost nothing but your self-conceit...If you really are so humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must learn to listen to sense. You're not quite the great horse you had come to think, from living among poor dumb horses. Of course you were braver and cleverer than them. You could hardly help being that. It doesn't follow that you'll be anyone special in Narnia. But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole."

Who knows what series we will find after we finish Narnia, perhaps The Lord of the Rings or The Little House books. As parents, there are so many different ways you can go about passing on the truth of your faith and values to your children: sometimes you talk about faith, sometimes you talk about values, and sometimes you can even talk about a Talking Horse.

(Bogarted from my weekly "column" in our parish bulletin! I figured that you, my 2 faithful blog readers, wouldn't mind! God Bless!)